I'd also like to reflect on how my current interest in SF&F is just a phase. I don't expect it to last too long. I mean when I was a kid, I was into comics. I even had the comic where Gwen Stacy, Spiderman's original love interest, died. Of course since I was a kid back then, I didn't exactly take good care of it. The only remnants I have of that age is my Dark Phoenix saga compilation and Marvel's Best of What If compilation. I also don't know where all my Marvel trading cards 2nd ed. went.

After my comics phase was the video game phase. I was collecting all these magazines from Game Pro to Nintendo Power. During my time, RPGs weren't selling very well for the consoles, at least for the US. Street Fighter clones were in during that time and there was little publicity for RPGs. In Japan though, RPGs were another matter. I mean the Superfamicom as originally designed as an RPG console system. And I did find out about the first 64-bit game system, Atari's Jaguar. It flopped because it lacked 3rd-party support (game developers like Squaresoft, Konami, etc...). 3DO was just too expensive. If you owned a Neo Geo, you were rich. And Nintendo's Virtual Boy just didn't have mass appeal. Suffice to say, I stopped getting into the video game business in 1996. At that point, RPGs were gaining steam with the release of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger in the US.

Then there's the Magic: The Gathering CCG hobby that lasted for the next four years. Inquest magazines have been piling up and I had binders and boxes cards. I spent an average of P10,000 a year on M:TG boxes alone.

Then there was anime and I managed to recuperate my expenses from the previous years by selling the M:TG cards I wasn't playing with. Of course depression hit me and I stopped my anime obsession for quite some time. Anything after the year 2000, I am totally unaware of.